Universidade de Aveiro
2006
Departamento de Línguas e Culturas
Tânia Sofia de Matos
Antunes Ferreira
Trindade
A Inter-Relação da Arte e da Vida nas Comédias de
Woody Allen (1972-1998)
The Interpenetration of Art and Life in the Film
Comedies of Woody Allen (1972-1998)
dissertação apresentada à Universidade de Aveiro para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Estudos Ingleses, realizada sob a orientação científica do Prof. Doutor Anthony Barker, Professor Associado do Departamento de Línguas e Culturas da Universidade de Aveiro
ii
o júri
presidente Prof. Dr. Kenneth David Callahan
professor associado da Universidade de Aveiro
Prof. Dr. Anthony David Barker (Orientador) professor associado da Universidade de Aveiro
Prof. Dr. Joaquim João Cunha Braancamp de Mancelos
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acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Anthony Barker for his important ideas, suggestions and corrections and also for having expanded my knowledge of American film comedies.
I am also indebted to Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema for the splendid assistance of its helpful staff that provided me important material concerning the scope of my study.
I am particularly grateful to my family and closest friends for supporting me in countless ways and for repeatedly reminding me that my enterprise was worthwhile.
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palavras-chave arte, vida, Judaísmo, autor, Nova Iorque, show business, persona, comédia
resumo A presente dissertação tem como objectivo investigar a inter-relação da arte e da vida nas comédias de Woody Allen, incidindo particularmente no período compreendido entre 1972 e 1998. Este trabalho analisa o papel de Woody Allen enquanto auteur, a importância da fantasia na sua obra e a sua relação com a realidade, a forma como as suas raízes Judaicas influenciaram a sua concepção de arte, o abismo entre Woody Allen e a indústria cinematográfica americana e a complexa relação estabelecida entre o verdadeiro Woody Allen e a sua persona. A tese é composta pelo estudo de filmes particularmente relevantes no que diz respeito à temática arte/vida, por uma lista bibliográfica, por uma filmografia do autor (Woody Allen) e por uma lista de filmes de outros autores igualmente importantes para o estudo em causa.
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keywords art, life, Jewishness, auteur, New York, show business, persona, film comedy
abstract The present dissertation aims to investigate the interpenetration of art and life in the film comedies of Woody Allen, focusing particularly on the period between 1972 and 1998. This work analyses Allen’s role as an auteur, the importance of fantasy in his work and its relationship with reality, the way his Jewish roots have influenced his conception of art, the gulf between Woody Allen and the American film industry and the complex relationship established between the real Allen and his onscreen persona. The thesis comprises the study of important films concerning the art/ life thematic, a consulted
bibliography, a Woody Allen’s filmography and a list of films by other authors equally important for this study.
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.
Frederico Fellini
Allen’s Cultural Background and Career
Over the past decades, Woody Allen’s films have awakened the attention of film critics and several studies have been conducted to unveil the work of a man who has enjoyed a dual status and a singular place in the history of the American cinema. American Jewish born,1 Allan Konigsberg would be consecrated as one of the most prolific independent American directors and would establish his own production unit away from the tentacles of the Hollywood monolith. His filmography comprises thirty six feature films, which were not blockbusters but which nevertheless allowed him to develop a solid and respected reputation as a filmmaker, especially in Europe. Before undertaking the task of analysing Allen’s films and his career as a filmmaker, it is important to offer a brief overview of his cultural background as well as of the evolution of his career.
Allen’s parents belonged to a generation of Jewish immigrants haunted by the memories of their parents’ escape from Europe and who inevitably faced the burden of their ancestry. Although Allen was raised in a typical Jewish family and in spite of having attended Hebrew school before he moved to Midwood High School, he has never felt attracted to Judaism or to other religion. As the author states in Woody Allen – A Biography,
I was unmoved by the synagogue, I was not interested in the Seder, I was not interested in the Hebrew school, I was not interested in being Jewish. It just didn’t mean a thing to me. I was not ashamed of it nor was I proud of it. It was a nonfactor to me. I didn’t care about it. It just wasn’t my field of interest. I cared about baseball, I cared about movies. To be a Jew was not something that I felt ‘Oh, God, I’m so lucky’. Or ‘Gee, I wish I were something else’. I certainly had no interest in being Catholic or in any of the other Gentile religions. (Lax, 40-41)
1
Woody Allen is the pseudonym for Allan Stewart Konigsberg, who was born on December 1, 1935 in the Bronx, New York. Allen’s childhood and upbringing were partly connected to Europe since his parents’ roots were European. Like most American-Jewish people, Martin Konigsberg and Nettie Cherrie were born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan but their families came from Russia and Vienna respectively.
Paradoxically, Allen’s films reveal a strange obsession with themes like the existence or non-existence of God, the meaning of life and the necessity for a moral order and moral integrity. The characters of Allen’s films often search for a substitute for religion to fill the spiritual vacuum of modern life, a space which is often occupied by art, as it will be discussed further on in this thesis. With regard to the fact of being a Jew, the author also attests that it has never influenced his artistic consciousness. As he explained to Natalie Gittelson,
It’s not on my mind; it’s no part of my artistic consciousness. There are certain cultural differences between Jews and non-Jews, I guess, but I think they’re largely superficial. Of course, any character I play would be Jewish, just because I’m Jewish. (Woody Allen quoted by Nancy Pogel, 25)
In spite of denying the influence of Jewishness on his work, much of Allen’s humour emanates from his urban Jewish background and the persistence of Jewish themes is a constant in his films. Furthermore, Allen’s persona finds its roots in a typical figure of the Yiddish tradition, the schlemiel, which is a popular stereotype of the guilt-ridden and anxious Jewish mentality. In spite of having never directly felt the burden of being a Jew, Allen’s cultural heritage probably accounts for the fact that his persona is constantly haunted by the spectrum of ‘outsiderdom’. Allen’s character type represents a stranger within his own society, a man whose inability to fit in reflects his frustrations and his anxieties. In this context, by invariably playing and portraying Jewish characters, the figure of the outsider reflects the figure of the artist himself. Radio Days (1987), for example, recollects the childhood of a young red-haired Jew patterned after Allen himself and the everyday life of a Jewish family, which in many aspects resembles Allen’s own family. In this context, the echo of past memories builds “a portrait of the artist as a young man”. The author himself attests for this when interviewed by Stig Björkman in Woody Allen on Woody Allen:
STIG BJÖRKMAN: How close is the story in Radio Days to your own childhood?
WOODY ALLEN: Some things are very close and some things are not. But a lot of it is based on an exaggerated view of my childhood. I mean, I did live in a family with many people present in the house: grandparents and aunts and uncles. And a certain period of my childhood I did live in a house right by the water. In Long Beach. But I didn’t want to travel all the way to Long Beach to shoot the film. Yes, many of the things you see in the film
did happen. My relationship to the school teachers was like that. My relationship to radio was like that. The same with the Hebrew school. And we used to go out to the beach and look for German aircraft and German boats. And I did have an aunt who was forever getting into the wrong relationships and unable to get married. She never did get married. And we did have those neighbours who were communists. Much of all that was true. I was taken to New York to the Automat and to radio programmes. My cousin lived with me. We did have a telephone line where we listened in on the neighbours. All these things occurred. (Björkman, 158)
A deeper examination of Allen’s comic persona as a reflex of the artist is going to be expounded in the upcoming chapters of this thesis.
Woody Allen came into film from writing. He started writing jokes for newspaper columnists such as Earl Wilson and Walter Winchell at sixteen. After this, he started writing comic material for several entertainers, including Bob Hope and Arthur Murray. When Allen left Midwood High School, he enrolled on a film course, “Motion Picture Production,” but he failed it and he dropped out of university after the first semester. In 1955 he was hired to make up part of NBC’s writer development program and he started contributing with comic material for
The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Show of Shows, The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show and for comics such as Sid Caesar. It was in 1960 that along with
his written contribution for Candid Camera, he began his night-club circuit act and his career as a stand-up comedian. With the support of Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, his managers to date, Allen performed in several cafes in Greenwich Village2, including the Duplex and The Blue Angel. Allen’s stand-up routines stem from the tradition of the Borscht Belt Circuit3 and therefore, Mort Sahl, Sid Caesar and Danny Kaye who regularly performed in Borsch Belt resorts, served as models for Allen’s performances. Finally, in 1964, Allen was given the chance to write the screenplay of What’s New Pussycat? The film was the biggest-grossing comedy of that time and Allen was recognized as a credible screenwriter. Nevertheless, it was an unpleasant experience for Allen not only because he spent a disagreeable six months in Paris during the production of the film, but also
2
Greenwich Village is known as an important landmark of bohemian culture. It has been a point for the development of new cultural ideas and during the 50s, 60s and 70s dozens of icons got their start there.
3
The Borscht Belt Circuit was the Jewish summer resort in the Catskill Mountains where Jewish entertainers who worked on TV used to perform. Borscht is a sort of beet soup popular in Eastern Europe.
because Charles K. Feldman, who had hired Woody Allen, changed almost completely his original script. What’s up Tiger Lily? (1966), a Japanese James Bond imitation movie, would become the first film directed by Allen and the first sign of autonomy in his career as a filmmaker. In addition to this, Allen began writing essays and short stories for newspapers and this material was gathered in three books: Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975) and Side Effects
(1980)4. Although Allen has built a prolific career as a writer and filmmaker, it should be emphasized that Allen is a largely self-educated person and that he does not possess any formal training in filmmaking. Rather he belongs to the tradition of Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder: writers of genuine wit who found other (often humourless) people mangled their work, and so took up directing as the best way of allowing their work to retain its essential spirit of comedy.
Main Influences and Features of Allen’s Work
Regarded by many as an eccentric, Woody Allen is a man of contrasts, and so is his work. Seeing his films can be a protean experience because the audience never knows what to expect from them. Allen has written and produced comedies (Take The Money and Run, Bananas) dramas (Interiors, Another
Woman), romantic comedies (Annie Hall, Anything Else), pseudo-documentaries
(Zelig), futuristic fantasies (Sleeper), comedies of (bad) manners (Deconstructing
Harry, Celebrity), and musicals (Everybody Says That I Love You), creating a body
of work which Eric Lax classifies as “an eclectic mélange of subjects and styles” (Lax, 274). Allen’s “quasi-hybrid”, schizophrenic style also intertwines aspects of popular culture with elements of high culture in a game dominated by a reversal strategy: the filmmaker intellectualizes aspects of popular culture and trivializes aspects of high culture. Since he parodies serious intellectual subjects, his body of work is structured upon the struggle between intellectuality and popularity, the humorous and the serious. With respect to this, Sam Girgus affirms in his essay “Woody Allen and American Character in Deconstructing Harry” that “[m]any have
4
Getting Even, published in 1971, is a collection of Allen’s 60s magazine pieces. Without Feathers, written between 1972 and 1975, features two one act plays (Death and God). Side Effects is an anthology of 17 comic short stories written between 1975-1980 which were previously published in newspapers like The New
compared the social and moral dimensions of his comedic brilliance in film to Mark Twain’s contribution to American humor and American literary realism. Like Twain, Allen melds aesthetic complexity with popular culture” (King, 143), offering up a portrait of the modern American way of life, its complexities, its anxieties and its contrasts.
One important aspect of Allen’s artistic approach lies in the dialogic, self-reflexive and intertextual nature of his films, a key practice of artistic postmodernism. As Nancy Pogel acknowledges,
The dialogues Allen creates utilize a sense of play with verbal and visual language that is typical of densely intertextual postmodern films: self-reflexive imagery (cameras, mirrors, etc.); retrospective structures; autobiographical allusions; appearances by the filmmaker in his own films; casting based on an actor’s or actress’s earlier films or personal life; use of real-life, theatrical, and nontheatrical figures in the midst of fictional film; narrative frames; discussions of art and filmmaking; and allusions to plays, novels, cartoons, short stories, television, and especially to other films. (Pogel, 12)
Allen becomes an artist studying his own art in a broad context. Allen’s films cannot be analysed in closed systems because ignoring the wide variety of texts they allude to, would be undermining an important part of their richness and legacy. Allen’s films are full of literary, filmic and philosophic references which take the form of postmodern strategies, such as homage, pastiche and parody. A
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) is one of the films that best epitomizes
Allen’s intertextual style. Needless to say, Allen’s film makes reference to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Apart from the similarity of the titles, both stories revolve around couples who switch partners and both of them oppose the natural and the civilized worlds as well. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is also indebted to Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), where shifts between partners also lead to a final re-established order. Another example of Allen’s intertextuality is Annie Hall (1977) where direct references to Freud, Felinni and Disney’s Snow White (1939) are made. Moreover, Annie Hall is consistent in its use of parody to portray New York intellectuals, who are represented by Alison and Robin (Alvy’s former wives) and Jewish immigrant families (like Alvy’s family). Generally, the structure of Allen’s films is fragmented and exposes discontinuities
between screen-time and narrative-time, suggesting that fragmentation is a condition for living in a postmodern world.
To a limited extent, the distinctiveness of Allen’s creations lies at the intersection of the wide range of traditions which permeate his films. In this respect, Eric Lax acknowledges the following:
Among Woody Allen’s many talents is his ability to incorporate mimicry with creativity. He learned the cadences of Bob Hope, the language of S. J. Perelman, the style of George Lewis, the outlook of Mort Sahl, the obsessions of Ingmar Bergman, the zaniness of the Marx Brothers, the soulfulness of Buster Keaton, the existential dilemma of Jean-Paul Sartre, the exaggerated exoticness of Federico Fellini, along with a score of additional influences…(Lax, 273)
By enumerating some of the sources which influence Allen, Eric Lax not only insinuates the diversity of his work but also declares its complexity. One of the reasons why Allen’s films resist any sort of categorization and classification is precisely because of the diverse sort of influences that they mirror and which include comedy (Bob Hope, Buster Keaton), existential philosophy (Jean-Paul Sartre) and drama (Frederico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman). For film critic Foster Hirsch, however, “foreign” influences are so obvious in Allen’s work that he is tempted to observe that Allen is not an original, a pioneer. As he affirms in his study Love, Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life in Allen’s Films, Allen is “[a] brilliant borrower and adapter rather than innovator” (Hirsch, 153). In my opinion, such a statement fails to take account of just what a contested area innovation occupies in the theory of art and presents too limited a perspective on Allen’s work. Allen’s many influences reveal that he is a connoisseur of cinema, literature, philosophy and art in general, which adds complexity to the meaning of his films. Furthermore, I would argue that Allen blends several traditions with his own creative genius. On balance, I definitely agree with Eric Lax when he states that “he mixed their essences [referring to Allen’s influences] with his own to produce a unique sensibility” (Lax, 273). Taking into consideration that Ingmar Bergman, for example, is regarded as one of Allen’s major influences, critics tend to forget that while the former has always worked in serious drama, Allen is essentially a comic artist. There is no doubt that Allen’s films were highly influenced by several
traditions, but the analysis of his work should not be circumscribed by those source traditions.
Allen’s career has evolved through different stages and has been marked by increasing ambition and ingenuity. The first stage of his career followed the traditions of the Jewish popular entertainment and of the American burlesque with roots in Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Notwithstanding the fact that Woody Allen is widely known for his comedies, being a comic was just the first step in his career as a filmmaker. After the first openly comic stage of his career, Allen was seduced by a more serious tone which drinks in the tradition of European art cinema, where Allen finds motifs that carry an important thematic weight, paying tribute to the pantheon of European masters notably Fellini, Bergman and Fritz Lang. From European art cinema Allen absorbed intellectual depth, character complexity and ambiguity, preoccupation with metaphysical questions and the curiosity to enlarge the potential of audiovisual language to explore internal and external spheres like human psychology and society.
The self-reflexivity of his cinema, the combination of serious questions and comic absurdity, his passion for art and his interest in metaphysical questions allowed him to develop a personal style and to be regarded as an auteur. Allen is considered an auteur not only because he was able to create a personal style, imposing his personal Weltanschauung on a public medium, but also unusually he seems to possess complete control over his work: thematically, aesthetically and technically. The brilliance of Allen’s direction per se consists in the control he exercises at every stage of the filmmaking process. His work exhibits a very high level of craft in the making of the film. He controls everything: the sets, the costumes, the music, the sound and the editing, providing an extraordinary sense of delight in cinematic design. Content-wise, Allen’s films are haunted by the same recurrent themes from different perspectives: the struggle to live in a world without God, the quest to find the meaning of life, the disintegration of relationships and the fragile essence of love, the lack of morality in a dehumanized society, the relationship between art and life, the confusion between them both and the role of
the artist in art and life. Allen’s films are never predicated on tame assumptions nor do they reach easy conclusions. His body of work takes the form of a work-in-progress, self-reflexive and dialogical. Allen’s films talk to each other and constitute private conversations between the filmmaker and the audience, which often assume an intimate style. One of the reasons why Allen’s films constitute private conversations is because Woody Allen does not speak to a very wide audience. Allen is arguably a caricaturist who has built a new portrait of the professional American-Jewish intellectual. Thus, his films are targeted at the metropolitan middle-classes of America and Europe which respond to his neuroses. Allen’s art functions in closed worlds which talk to each other. He talks to a group of creative and gifted people who also shares Allen’s concerns: the New York intelligentsia in the first instance and other intelligentsias after that. Therefore, the author feels comfortable in following the impulse to explore in film the fears that (apparently) dog him in real life.
However, the secret of Allen’s success seems to be directly connected to the creation of a screen persona he has inhabited over the years, a persona that showed many facets while maintaining its originality. As I see it, the Allen persona “inhabits” most of the films he produces since he has played a part in almost all his films until quite recently. Perhaps his most remarkable feature is that unlike Chaplin or Keaton he does not wear a disguise. When the audience encounters Woody Allen in a film, identification between the onscreen character and the real man is immediate: Allen uses the same clothes and the same glasses he uses everyday. By adopting the same look on-and-off-screen, his private world inevitably merges with the public macrocosm. For all these reasons, the public image of Allen, the artist, tends more probably than in the case of other film directors to converge around the figure he presents on screen. Allen and his
persona share the same look and the same existential doubts, they like the same
places and they even date the same women. In this context, Allen’s persona becomes the artist’s doppelgänger, fostering the confusion between art and life even if the audience senses that Allen’s persona must be “an exaggerated version
of himself”, “one that blurred the line between autobiography and comedy” (Meade, 54).
Over the years, the consistency of Allen’s persona and the game it has played between the real and the fictional has helped him to sustain an unusually long and solid career. In the nineties, however, changes in his reputation due to the Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi scandal contributed to the emergence of a new approach to filmmaking. As Sam Girgus points out,
In Allen’s case, the fusion of the public and private selves helped him achieve success, but as it turned out, the same merger of the public and private in life and work increased his vulnerability to painful exposure concerning his private life. He has not been able to inoculate his public image against an association with his private behavior. (Girgus, I)
Sam Girgus acknowledges that the fusion between Allen and his own persona was both the cause of his success and the cause of his recent fall from popularity. The unexpected shift in Allen’s public image was decisive for the emergence of a more bitter and assertive Allen. At the same time, this decade is marked by a (sometimes) desperate attempt to dissociate his onscreen persona from the real Allen and to scrutinize the condition, status and angst of being a celebrity by onscreen deconstruction. In the last few years, Allen has devoted himself to a more commercial and lighter type of film, where he no longer plays his former screen self (Small Time Crooks, Melinda and Melinda) . In itself, this suggests that he has not been overly successful in making that dissociation. Nevertheless, this thesis argues that his struggles to create his screen persona and to maintain it in the face of a hostile or, more recently, a younger disengaged audience has definitely contributed to the interesting diversity of independent American film-making and has presented a highly individualistic view of modern America.
Aims and Approaches
Generally speaking, this thesis will focus on the interpenetration between art and life in Allen’s films, which is both a broad and a challenging theme. Therefore, the theme will be divided into subsections which will in turn take up the following aspects: the construction of Allen’s persona, Allen’s establishment as a film auteur, the self-reflexivity in Allen’s films, the felt difference between art and show business in his work and the problematic issues which centre on questions of persona and authenticity.
In the first part, this thesis aims to examine the construction of Allen’s
persona and its influence on his work, focusing on the way Woody Allen deals with
the question, “to be or not to be an auteur”. This will obviously include a review of the development of the auteur theory and the utility and relevance of its application to Allen’s life and work.
Secondly, it is widely recognized that the power of Allen’s films is closely connected to their clever interplay between art and life. Since art and life are permanently interlocked in Allen’s universe, there is a wide range of interesting questions to be answered: what is the balance between lived experience and imagination expressed in Woody Allen’s films? Is it art that imitates life or life that imitates art? Do films and art serve any valuable purpose or do they mislead us about life? Should films primarily be a form of entertainment or should they pursue any other specific social goals? What is the role that mass media in general play in our lives? These are some of the questions this study will focus on and try to examine in some detail.
The integrity of the artist in relation to his art and his social role in relation to the exterior world will also be discussed throughout this study. Thus, this thesis also aims to understand the moral implications of being an original artist in Allen’s universe and the conflict between show business and art, as Allen represents them in his films.
The issue of artistic persona and personal authenticity is also one of the points this study will focus on. How can we distinguish between art and life,
persona and authenticity? What are the implications of confounding these two in
Allen’s life and work? This question establishes a link with another of the themes explored by Allen in his films and that too is central to this particular study: the power of the cinematic image and its wider influence on society. This thesis will analyse the construction of these images and the web of implications that spread out from them. All in all, this thesis aims to provide some orientation on these critical and difficult points, taking into consideration the various factors which make up the cinematic process and serve to determine the relationship between life and art in Allen’s universe.
This thesis is motivated by the conviction that film studies have become a legitimate part for the understanding of the cultural constructions and history of the twentieth century. In the first instance, these questions arose from the fascination I have with Allen as a filmmaker. But further study has revealed that these are questions which have historically troubled artists and entertainers from a very wide social and artistic prospectus. I believe this project to be important because Woody Allen’s cinema is as personal as that of acknowledged masters like Fellini and Bergman. Moreover, he has been prolific over a sustained period of time and produced a homogenous and challenging body of work, when many writers and directors have anonymously buried themselves in the profitable cinema of popular genres. Furthermore, I believe this project will be able to shed some light on the uses and abuses of mass media in our lives.
I appreciated the difficulty of my task from the very beginning, since the research area of this thesis covers a wide range of interconnected and complex themes. On the other hand, given the great number of films directed by Allen, it would be impossible to proceed to a succinct analysis of them all, and therefore, a selection was made according to the thematic concerns of this research study. This thesis is divided into five different sections. The first chapter reviews the
arrival of the auteur theory, its evolution and purpose in film theory and practice. The chapter continues with an analysis of the application of the auteur theory to Allen’s work. This chapter also examines the nature of Allen’s persona and the general features which have contributed to the positioning of Allen as one of the few American auteurs. Each one of the three following chapters engages in the analysis of three feature films directed by Woody Allen. The second chapter, which explores Ross’s film version of Play it Again, Sam5 (1972), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Stardust Memories (1980), is devoted to the analysis of
something that most critics consider to be a conundrum in Allen’s work: the relationship between art and life, fiction and reality. The chapter discusses the way Allen’s films blur the line between art and life and the implications of this for the reception of his work. It also examines the role films play in people’s lives and it focuses on the ‘spectator-character’ identificatory relationship. In addition, the chapter also raises the question of the purpose of art and of the role of the artist, an issue which recurs in both chapter three and chapter four. The chapter concludes with an overview of the meanings conveyed by these three films and with some general remarks on the topic.
Show business and art are compared and contrasted in chapter three, which focuses on Annie Hall (1977), Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Bullets
over Broadway (1994). The chapter starts with a general comparison between
Allen’s work and that one of his American contemporary filmmakers, in order to establish the difference between Allen’s films and the business-minded films of Hollywood. Then, the chapter contextualizes Allen’s work within the Jewish tradition, offering a retrospective view of Jewish assimilation into American culture through the world of show business. After analysing the Jewish inheritance in Allen’s work, the chapter continues with the analysis of the three above-mentioned films. At the end of the chapter, some conclusions are drawn with respect to the topic of discussion.
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Allen originally wrote Play it Again, Sam as a play which opened at the Broadhurst in February 12, 1969. The play was the eleventh most popular play on the American amateur stage and it was translated to several languages. The film version of Play it again, Sam was directed by Herbert Ross and inspired in the original play written by Allen.
Zelig (1983), Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Celebrity (1998) are objects of analysis in chapter four, which addresses the problematic authenticity vs.
persona dichotomy. This chapter raises again some of the questions that were
already focused on in the preceding chapters, such as the interpenetration between art and life, but in a more personal context. The chapter also presents a reflection of the perils and consequences of confusing character and man / artist. Furthermore, this chapter also examines the precarious status of being a celebrity and the power the media exercise over people’s lives.
At the end of the thesis, a general conclusion about the fate of people who live in the public eye is drawn. I also offer a critical appraisal of Allen’s body of work and of his achievements. Suggestions for areas of further study on Woody Allen’s films are also included in this section.
Chapter I:
“Where artist and art intersect, they reveal the man”.
Eric Lax
Considerations on the “ Politique des Auteurs”
The cinéma d’auteur ideologically underpinned the elevation of cinema to an art form. Its function was to appropriate classical types of prestige for cinema, by associating filmmaking with other traditional forms of artistic creativity. Painting, writing and composing, for instance, were all produced by individuals whose works were gathered by an “intellectual quorum” into its classical canons of excellence. Film aspired to that level of prestige and to public recognition of artistic excellence and it aimed to personalize the artistic achievements, creating its own Tolstoy, Mozart and Leonardo da Vinci.
In 1948, French film critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc wrote an article entitled “Naissance d’une Nouvelle Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo” (“The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo”)6 in which he writes that
the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successfully a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of
caméra-stylo. (Alexandre Astruc, quoted by John Caughie, 9)
Alexandre Astruc foresaw the emergence of cinema as a medium of self-expression “as subtle as the written word”. He believed that cinema was an art form like painting or novel, and therefore, he conceived the camera as a pen with its own language, a form by which the artist expressed his thoughts like in a novel. Astruc’s conception of cinema as a language and Bazin’s opinion that film should reflect the director’s personal vision are reflected in the core ideas of the cinéma
d’auteurs.
6
It was between the 1950’s and the 1960’s that French film critics started to give shape to the politique des auteurs, as an attempt to trace the personal style of directors through their films. The term auteur was officially used in an article that François Truffaut wrote in January 1954 entitled “Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français” (“A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”), which was published in the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. In the 1960s Andrew Sarris introduced and developed this concept into American criticism, translating it as “the author theory” in an essay entitled “Notes on the Author Theory in 1962”7. Nevertheless, this movement was never a theory in its essence. The critics of
Cahiers du Cinéma always talked about the politique des auteurs, a policy which
set out to provide a critical tool. As John Caughie explains it in the introduction of his book Theories of Authorship: a Reader, the conundrum of film theory had always focused on “the relation between the representation and the real thing, and had not developed an aesthetic to explain the place of the artist in film art” (Caughie, 10). The elevation of cinema to an art hastened the question of the place of the artist in the art of film since, it is claimed “art is the expression of the emotions, experience and ‘worldview’ of an individual artist” (Caughie, 10). In the first chapter of Cinéma d’Auteur, une Vieille Lune?, André Prédal explains that the term auteurism finds its origin in literary criticism, a fact that is reminiscent of Caughie’s opinion that this politique imposed on the cinema a figure that the other arts had already adopted and that was based on the concept of the “romantic artist, individual and self-expressive” (Caughie, 10). So, certain studies on the author that were made in the field of the literary criticism may be useful to understand the application of this role to the world of the cinema. In the essay “The Death of the Author”, Roland Barthes affirms that,
The author is a modern figure, a product of our society (…) it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the “‘human person” (…) The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the
author “confiding’ in us. (Caughie, 209)
The emphasis of this politique lies on the creative genius of the artist and therefore this movement proposed to study films through a director-centred analysis, so that
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a standard of reference and a distinct personal style could be found in and traced from film to film in the work of selected directors. In general terms,
Film criticism became a process of discovery, a process which, while it remained firmly within the hermeneutics of romantic criticism, forced a more precise attention to what was actually happening within the film than had been customary for a traditional criticism which tended to be satisfied with the surfaces of popular films, assuming that the conditions of their production prevented them from having depths. (Caughie, 12)
On the other hand, the politique des auteurs assumed from the beginning that despite of the constraints of the cinema industry, personal works of art might be found everywhere, including in the highly commercial industry of Hollywood. In an article entitled “The Author Theory Revisited”, published in American Film, Andrew Sarris explains that,
The French critics tended to brush aside the distinctions between cinema as a medium and cinema as an art form. “The cinema is everything”, Godard declared. And he meant it. Every scrap of film was grist for his sensibility. The cinema was no longer a holy temple to which only certain sanctified works were admitted. Cinema was to be found on every movie screen in the world, and Hollywood movies were no less cinematic than anything else. (American Film, 53)
The politique des auteurs aspired, as René Prédal points out, to legitimate the cinema as a high standard art, showing precisely that in the film industry, as in the other arts it is possible to find authenticity in which is expressed the author’s deepest or most intimate thoughts or recollections:
L’idée était de démontrer que dans l’industrie du cinéma, celle des producteurs, des genres et des équipes de techniciens, reste quand même place pour d’authentiques artistes imposant leur regard, proposant leur propre vision du monde, exprimant leurs préoccupations personnelles et même intimes. (Prédal, 52)
On these grounds, the ultimate goal of this policy was the establishment of a canon in film, the creation of a pantheon of filmmakers as it had already happened with literature and which allowed the distinction between the cinéma commercial and the cinéma artistique d’auteur; the metteurs en scène and the auteurs. The first step to recognizing an auteur consisted in creating a pattern of recurrent themes which expressed the author’s concerns. However, due to the visual nature of cinema, this was not considered enough. Attention was then paid to the aesthetic value of the mise-en-scène as the “stylistic signature of the director”
(Caughie, 12). Prédal understands the notion of auteur in its global context and so he describes it as a
synthèse articulant diverses composantes professionnelle (celui qui écrit aussi son scénario), thématique (des thèmes privilégiés, un regard et pour certains même une morale, c’est-à-dire une vision du monde) et enfin esthétique (un ton personnel, un mode de récit reconnaissable, des constantes plastiques au niveau du choix des objectifs, du cadrage, de la lumière, des mouvements d’appareil, du montage…), bref une éthique et un style”. (Prédal, 58)
Following on from this, it can be inferred that the true auteur is the one who exercises the fullest control over filmmaking: thematically, aesthetically and technically, such as for example Hitchcock. The concept of the film author was developed in America by Andrew Sarris who, according to Edward Buscombe in an article entitled “Ideas of Authorship”, transformed the politique des auteurs into “a cult of personality” (Caughie, 26) unconstrained by the author’s historical context. Indeed, Andrew Sarris did develop the idea of the auteur in America and introduced the English term ‘Author Theory’ but he was aware of the fact that this was “a pattern theory in constant flux”8 .
While it is true to say that the politique des auteurs contributed to the greater knowledge of films in depth, and therefore of the film artists who made them, it also presented some perils and limitations from its conception. Firstly, sceptics of this theory point out that making a film is by no means an individual act of creation but instead, a largely cooperative endeavour. In most cases, the auteur does not fully control all the required techniques of light, sound, special effects, editing, and so on. Although the contribution of the director is definitely crucial because he holds the overall task of coordination of skills, ignoring all the other people involved in filmmaking is to ignore several vital creative elements in it, for without them, the film could neither be produced nor possess the features that it does. After all, as Peter Wollen writes in the essay “The Auteur Theory”9, it is important to retain the idea that in comparison with other arts, the relationship between artist and work in the cinema is very different and peculiar. While in the
8
Information taken from “The Author Theory Revisited” in American Film, 50.
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other arts the author projects a “dream” and the work is created, in cinema it requires a myriad of people to transform a script into a film.
Secondly, auteur criticism tends to schematize defined patterns, but using such a formalist/ structuralist approach may endanger and contradict the whole purpose of film criticism. Art does not have a set of stable assumptions and formulating a list of specific characteristics of the different auteurs presents a reductive perspective on film. In this case, and taking into consideration the idea that auteurs must conform to certain specific and fixed characteristics, all their films would be reduced to an approved sameness. On this issue, Peter Wollen states in “The Auteur Theory” that,
[s]tructuralist criticism cannot rest at the perception of resemblances or repetitions (redundancies, in fact), but must also comprehend a system of differences and oppositions. In this way, texts can be studied not only in their universality (what they all have in common) but also in their singularity (what differentiates them from each other). (Caughie, 139)
Such observations can only confirm the idea that art is a spontaneous flow of thoughts and inspiration and consequently, a true auteur is not predictable and should not be recognized by a set of invariable motifs. As Peter Wollen further acknowledges: “The great directors must be defined in terms of shifting relations, in their singularity, as well as their uniformity” (Caughie, 143). Furthermore, Wollen cites Lévi-Strauss for whom “myths exist independently of style” (Caughie, 144), and states that the great metteurs en scène, as arguably in the case of Vincente Minnelli should not be undervalued for not being an auteur because that would be ignoring the stylistic and expressive dimension of film, a dimension which the author is free to concentrate entirely in. Besides, some studies on auteurism suggest that mise-en-scène may be very valuable to reveal the author. According to John Caughie,
It is with the mise en scène that the auteur transforms the material which has been given to him; so it is in the mise en scène - in the disposition of the scene, in the camera movement, in the camera placement, in the movement from shot to shot - that the auteur writes his individuality into the film. (Caughie, 12-13)
To a certain extent, the attention auteurism focuses on mise en scène may contribute to an authentic and accurate film criticism that is concerned with the mechanisms of visual discourse and not with literary patterns.
In addition to this, there are several factors that act upon a subject to make a film. A film need not be the predicament exclusively of an internal artistic motivation. The individual can be rather impelled by several external factors that affect the final product of a film. In the essay “Ideas of Authorship”, Edward Buscombe proposes the analysis of the effects of cinema on society, society on the cinema and the effects of films on other films. In my personal view, and because film is a melting pot of ideas and perceptions of reality from innumerable centres of culture, film analysis should not be restricted to an appreciation of the personal universe of the author. To reinforce this position, in the essay “Comment on the Idea of Authorship” Stephen Heat considers that the author is regarded as the creator of discourse but a language is by definition social “beyond any
particular individuality” (Caughie, 215). In this context, it makes no sense to
dissociate films from all the other factors to which they are exposed and from this perspective Buscombe’s proposal is of major importance.
There is also another side of the issue which concerns the reception of the film. Recent studies demonstrate that the nature of film is closely related to the interpretation that an audience makes of it. The scope of film interpretation should not be restricted to its auteur. In relation to this, Roland Barthes developed some ideas in the field of literary criticism which can be applied to film. He declared that “to give a text [film] an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Caughie, 212). In the light of the evidence, it is clear that in some points although it greatly increased the status of film art, the
auteur theory presents a reductive perspective on film analysis. The interpretation
of film includes much more than confining its meaning to the perspective of its author. In fact, the artist has no monopoly over the meanings which his / her work of art generates. It is therefore something of an absurdity to propose that all signification is cooked up inside the artist’s head. Meaning in the cinema (itself a
social milieu) is a complex negotiation between form, social context, individual experience and audience reception.
Certainly in film everything depends on the viewer’s vantage-point and it is in the audience that a consensus view lies. Yet, this reception is also influenced by the audience’s historical and social background and it is not possible to create stable and universal ideas about a film or an auteur because interpretation itself is formed by questions, doubts and contradictions. In 1968, Roland Barthes had already come to the conclusion that any given text consists not of one authorial voice, but of external influences, subconscious drives and pre-existing texts which shape signification. Barthes’s theory proclaimed the death of the author in favour of the reader’s free interaction with the text: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”10. Speaking about cinema in an era in which the audience is expected to have an active role in constructing meanings in films and culture in general, it makes sense to state that “the birth of the [viewer] must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. In this context, it is important to emphasize that while film culture was struggling to assume the director as an author, literature was shedding the author as autonomous creator. Thus, modern theory was deconstructing auteurism in all its applications, including its traditional, secure heartland. John Caughie acknowledges that
the critical shift which auteurism effected within the history of film criticism can be seen as a step backwards to a romantic conception of the artist as it is described by Abrams: a regressive step precisely at the moment at which romanticism was becoming less secure in other branches of criticism, and in a medium in which an aesthetic of individual self-expression seemed least appropriate. (Caughie, 11)
To sum up, I believe that the auteur theory presents both advantages and drawbacks. At a primary level, it acknowledges filmmaking as an art and recognizes the talent of new artists within a hitherto despised commercial industry. However, in choosing to ignore that films are a collaborative endeavour and by isolating them from their historical / social context, auteurism risks missing an important part of the richness of a mechanical-era art form. It is of crucial importance to understand that films are not products of a single controlling entity;
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instead, they are products of their times and they cannot be separated from their universal context. I recognize the importance of the auteur theory but I believe that it should be just one critical tool among many others in order to enlarge our understanding of films and cinema in their total context. One of those contexts is that auteurism has been usurped cynically by the film industry as a marketing tool for promoting films. When the lights go down and the screen says “A Martin Scorsese film”, this is very far from meaning that Martin Scorsese had total control over it: it works rather as something like a brand name, like Nike or Hugo Boss, to be a minimum guarantee of quality rather than a critical description.
The Implications of Auteurism in Allen’s Films
In the epilogue of Nancy Pogel’s Woody Allen she writes: “Since the release of his early comedies Take the Money and Run and Bananas, Woody Allen has developed into American cinema’s most renowned auteur”. In fact, after the overview offered in the previous section, there should be little doubt that Woody Allen meets the conditions for being considered an auteur in the classical sense of the word, since his unifying presence is crucial to the plot, tone and success of his films. His first step towards a career as an auteur has to do with the establishment of his onstage persona, which finds its genesis in Allen’s early comedies. In this context, to understand how the status of auteur arose and developed throughout his work, it is important to make a brief retrospective of his career, focusing on the influences on and function of his early little-man persona.
During the period of time between the 1950’s and the 1980’s, the United States witnessed the arrival of a wave of Jewish entertainer writers who emerged as artists, such as Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon. Following a similar trajectory, only after having established himself as a comic writer and entertainer, did Woody Allen start his career in film. Moreover, Allen’s experience as a stand-up comic and the ability to transform his diffidence into the key to his success allowed him to develop his stage persona and to become familiar to the public.
It was around 1965 that he engaged in filmmaking, starting his career as screenwriter and performer in What’s New, Pussycat? According to Nancy Pogel “[n]either the critics nor Woody Allen considered What’s New, Pussycat? an artistically important movie” (Pogel, 34). Nevertheless, the film was commercially successful enough to project Allen as the director of his own films. Besides, while the film is not an artistic achievement, it already reflects some of the themes developed in greater depth by Allen in later works. What’s New, Pussycat? reflects the changes caused by the sexual revolution that took place in the sixties and this is probably the reason why the film’s prevailing themes are related to the longing for romantic fulfilment and the desire for sexual accomplishment, which already focuses on Allen’s tendency to analyse modern relationships. Meanwhile, he had written two stage plays: Don’t Drink the Water (1969), a comic espionage story of the Cold War / iron curtain period and Play it Again, Sam (1969), whose film version is going to be analysed in a further section of this thesis. By this time, Woody signed a contract with United Artists to write whatever he wanted and make whatever film he wanted to make. Although What’s New, Pussycat? marked Allen’s entrée to the world of film, it was his next film, Take the Money and Run (1969) that marked the beginning of his directing experience. Consequently it was at that time that Woody felt his career in film had really began. Likewise, most of his critics agree that with Take the Money and Run Allen gave the first step towards becoming a renewed auteur. Take the Money and Run recreates the typically American gangster myth film such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and subverts its conventions. Virgil Starkwell (Woody Allen), the leading character is not as tough as a criminal is expected to be. To achieve a desirable comic effect, Allen deconstructs formulaic genres and stereotypes of “macho” ideals and portrays a clumsy incompetent gangster whose nervous mannerisms would be perpetrated by Allen’s comic persona. Curiously, at the same time the audience laughs at Allen’s little man comic disarticulation, Virgil Starkwell reveals Allen’s preference for casting sympathetic anti-heroes as leading characters. In effect, Allen’s films facilitate the spectator-character identification because Allen avoids models of heroism and portrays human, imperfect people. As Nancy Pogel
remarks, “Virgil Starkwell’s disorderly ineptitude signifies antistructure and makes us laugh at our reluctance to acknowledge our own very human flaws” (Pogel, 38).
One of the greatest ironies about Woody Allen’s career is that “[w]hile the character has almost no control over what happens to him, the man has almost complete control over what he does” (Lax, 11). From the very onset, it is Allen who makes the key decisions about the script, the acting, the sets, the camera-work, the cast, the direction, the editing and even the music. Strategies such as minimal lightning in close shots, direct addresses to the camera, voice over, black and white credits, flashbacks, visual images and the use of jazz as background music are recurrent in his films. The fact that he often employs the same crew - cinematographers Sven Nyquist, Gordon Willis, Carlo Di Palma and that he works with a reduced cast of friends and intimates, often featuring the same actors (as is the case of Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Dianne Weist, Judi Davis and Tony Roberts) helps to create an intimate approach of filming and one that has much in common with the serious theatre.
The setting of Allen’s films is also very familiar since most of them take place in New York, something that reveals a lot about the urban mentality of the artist. Allen has a cerebral love relationship with city spaces and this becomes evident through the constant homage he pays to New York (a subject which will be analysed in a later section). In his films, Allen throws a seductive look at his beloved Manhattan. Although Allen is a caricaturist who builds a specific portrait of the Jewish intelligentsia, he does not caricature New York; he romanticizes it in all its glamour and mystique. Eric Lax acknowledges that
New York is never dirty or decayed in a Woody Allen movie. Instead it glimmers and soars, it moves at an invigoratingly frantic pace and seems the apotheosis of cosmopolitan living. As he showed through George Gershwin’s music in Manhattan, New York, to him, is a rhapsody. (Lax, 20)
On the other hand, it is undeniable that personal concerns and life experiences do go into his films, exposing the self-reflexive nature of his works. Themes like the difficulties of living in a world without God, the fragility of romance, the fear of death, the purpose of art, the importance of moral awareness and the dangers of
lacking it are recurrent in his work. In fact, his whole career is marked by the search for a suitable personal model of artistic creation that can express his view of life. Although Allen’s themes remain more or less the same from the beginning to recent times, his ingenuity in expressing them has developed through time. Themes like the fragility of romance and the longing for human connection accompany Allen’s whole body of work. The audience finds them in the early films, like Take the Money and Run (1969) and in more mature works as is the case of Annie Hall (1977). The difference is that while in the early films Allen expands serious themes in a comic perspective, in later works he reveals a complex sensibility in their treatment.
It is not difficult to show that Woody Allen’s career has passed through different stages. His early films were markedly comic and used the structure of
Bildungsroman. These first comic films which include What’s up Tiger Lily?
(1966), Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Everything you Always
Wanted to Know About Sex (1972), Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975)
are a mixture of influences: his urban Jewish middle class humour, the tradition of the little-man humour and the very texts they mock. Love and Death, for example,
has literary antecedents because it is based and influenced by the 19th Russian novel. In the first instance, Woody develops the figure of the schlemiel which belongs to the Yiddish folklore. According to Mary Nichols in Reconstructing
Woody: Art, Love and Life in the Films of Woody Allen, “the schlemiel is a loser
(especially in love) who is victimized whichever way he turns but nevertheless converts his weakness into strength by means of his wit, his intellect, and his humour” (Nichols, 19-20). In fact, Woody Allen recreates with sophistication the figure of the “loser-as-a-hero” schlemiel, transforming him into an ironic analyst of the human condition. The schlemiel is an outsider, a misfit in an odd society, who suffers from the Jewish syndrome of guilt about material success. In this sense, the schlemiel mirrors the frustrations of the modern American modus vivendi: the claustrophobic urbanization, lack of communication and the division of people in ethnic ghettos. According to David Desser and Lester Friedman in the second chapter of American-Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends, the schlemiel
becomes the modern philosopher by mocking serious institutions, and by raising intimate meditations on controversial and recurrent themes such as sex, love, religion and art. In effect, as Irving Howe points out
As a possible mirror to the self, the schlemiel has a deep attractiveness at every point of our existence, for surely everyone holds a deep persuasion – and with sufficient basis, too – that he or she is indeed a schlemiel. (Howe, 571).
Consequently, more than fulfilling the mere function of an entertainer, the
schlemiel becomes a tool for criticism of serious themes and this is perhaps the
most striking and innovative feature of Allen’s comedy. Perhaps he is a modern Jewish version of the Shakespearean Fool-made-hero, one that makes us laugh at ourselves, using parody to criticise society.
The second great focus of influence in his early films is the tradition of little-man humour, which appeared in America in the 1920s and which has as its main representatives bittersweet and self-aware comic genius such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx and J. S. Perelman in the literary tradition. In
Woody Allen, Nancy Pogel explains the origin of this comic tradition:
Modern humorists find their world bewildering and unreliable rather than stable; rapid changes constantly threaten their values, the environment often seems overwhelming. As a result, their tone is often anxious, neurotic – even hysterical; they sometimes retreat into “inner space,” into fantasy worlds of impossible dreams and self-denigrating nightmares. (Pogel, 2)
Nancy Pogel also quotes the words of Hamlin Hill who says that “urbane humour…reflects the tinge of insanity and despair of contemporary society” (Pogel, 2). From thishumoristic tradition Allen took the distrust of and distaste for the fast pace of modern society and all its underlying phobias, a sense of mischief towards technology and the longing for close companionship. There can be no doubt that Woody Allen is an excellent observer of the “human comedy” and therefore his jokes stem directly from his close observations. His great dilemma is related to his apparent unfitness for society and to the need to try to be morally consistent in a dehumanized society. As Nancy Pogel states,
Despite the fact that conventional meaning and value systems no longer offer solace, the little man tries to remain a basically ethical character, one whose attempts to be honest set him apart from the modern mob and serve
as a positive contrast to the modern environment in which he tries to maintain his sanity. (Pogel, 3)
Notwithstanding this, Allen’s little-man is well-aware of the oppressive ways of the world and becomes a master of irony at all levels. Nancy Pogel acknowledges that,
The little-man becomes the focus of Allen’s existential predilection for dismantling monologic belief systems and social conventions with a greater tenacity then most early little-man humorists or filmmakers were willing to pursue. Allen has no sure solutions, but he effectively questions our most comforting cultural norms or fundamental beliefs and lays doubt on the claims of those concepts that pretend to offer meaning, and prevent people from facing the crucial problems of existence. (Pogel, 8-9)
Woody Allen is a thinker and he wants people to think. Consequently, he challenges codes as well as he overthrows established assumptions, assuming the role of a countercultural figure in a hostile society.
Widely regarded as one of the most important influences on Allen’s work, Charlie Chaplin is also the main representative of the little-man tradition in film. In real life, both Allen and Chaplin write, play a part and direct the different stages of the filmmaking process. In fiction, most critics seem to agree with the fact that Chaplin’s little tramp and Allen’s little-man share many resemblances. Firstly, since they represent solitary figures their personas are simultaneously victims and fierce critics of the hostile world which surrounds them. Secondly, in their longing for human connection, they both provide a human alternative in the dehumanized and impersonal world they inhabit in. Another common feature of Chaplin’s little fellow and Allen’s little man is that in difficult or unpleasant circumstances, both of them retreat into imaginary or fantasy worlds. An example of this, is that at the same time Allan Felix seeks advice in Hollywood imaginary figures (Play it Again,
Sam) or Sandy Bates escapes from reality into childhood recollections, (Stardust Memories) the little tramp falls asleep and introduces a dream sequence in which
he imagines New Year’s Eve party in “his” cabin and the famous dinner rolls dance or try to eat his shoe’s laces as substitute for spaghetti (The Gold Rush). Curiously, both filmmakers are aware of the fact that fantasy does not always offer solace for reality demands. As Nancy Pogel observes, “[l]ike Allen’s films,
Chaplin’s often reflexive art is ambivalent about the powers of imagination, holding faith and scepticism in delicate balance” (Pogel, 6). Apart from this, artistic creativity is something for which both Allen and Chaplin find no rational explanation. In Limelight (1952), clown Calvero (Charlie Chaplin) becomes the embodiment of the intuitive artist before entering the stage for his final performance:
Calvero: This is where I belong. Terry: I thought you hated the theatre.
Calvero: I do. I also hate the sight of my blood, but it’s in my veins. (Limelight)
Although Allen’s persona is partly influenced by the tradition of the American silent comedy and especially by Chaplin, there are also remarkable differences between them. To begin with, it was already referred that Allen came to film from writing and that much of his humour stems from the literary tradition. Therefore, contrarily to Chaplin’s, Allen’s humour is much more verbal than visual. Allen’s comic situations rely mostly on their dialogic nature, something which also stems from his experience as a stand-up comedian. While Chaplin’s humour places emphasis on visual situations and slapstick acrobatics Allen expounds verbal humour. One of the best epitomes for Chaplin’s comic situations is one sequence in The Tramp (1915) where a vagrant exchanges the Tramp’s (Charlie Chaplin) sandwich for a brick and consequently, the Tramp has to eat grass. Later, the same vagrant molests a farmer’s daughter and the tramp helps her using the brick. Another emblematic epitome for Chaplin’s situational humour, happens in Modern Times (1936) when the Tramp looks for a bolt to tighten while he is being pulled through the gears of an enormous machine. Although Allen’s first films are an excellent combination of slapstick and verbal comedy, Allen’s comic strength resides in his comic verbal ability. In Sleeper (1973), many examples of comic humour can be found. After being frozen for 200 years, Miles Monroe (Woody Allen), the leading character exclaims: “I haven’t seen my analyst in 200 years. He was a strict Freudian. If I’d been going all this time, I’d probably almost be cured by now” (Sleeper). Miles’s self-definition is also very funny and demonstrates Allen’s cerebral and verbal humour: “I’m what you would call a teleological, existential atheist. I believe that there’s intelligence to the universe, with an exception of
certain parts of New Jersey” (Sleeper). The differences between the two filmmakers are also historically explained: Allen writes about modern American life. As the author affirms, “I don’t want my pictures to be compared with Keaton or Chaplin. You can’t compare. I’m working forty years later. I’m a product of TV and psychoanalysis” (Hirsch, 108). In this context, while Chaplin’s comedy placed a heavy emphasis on visual and physical humour, providing for the tastes of people in the twenties (with a large percentage of non-English-speaking immigrants in America, and an enormous following all around the world), Allen’s comedy is essentially verbal and it responds to the needs and tastes of contemporary life. The differences between Allen and his sources are as obvious as the similarities: unlike Chaplin’s comedy, Allen is a comedy of dialogue and monologue, not a comedy of situation.
Another element that distinguishes the two comics is that Chaplin’s films are enriched in their emotional tone and Allen prefers a cerebral tradition of comedy like Groucho Marx. In other words, while Chaplin appeals strongly to people’s feelings, something suggested by the end of City Lights (1931), Allen uses psychoanalysis to analyse and intellectualise relationships. In addition to this, I would argue that the main difference between Allen and Chaplin’s personas lies in their visual construction. Unlike Chaplin, Allen’s persona does not wear a disguise. The little fellow wears a hat, baggy pants, a cane, a moustache and is characterised by his duck-walking. In Allen’s case, his persona’s outlook is the very same of the “real character”: he wears the same glasses and the same clothes Allen uses everyday. These similarities fostered the confusion between the real character and the fictional character. In addition to this, while Chaplin’s disguise might have helped in disassociating the real Chaplin from his persona when he faced some scandals concerning his private life, the similarities between Allen and his persona contributed to a deeper identification between the character and the private behaviour of the filmmaker during the period of the Soon Yi / Mia Farrow scandal.
